Trump Channels Nation's Founders

A recent article by Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsh argued that far from being a boorish yahoo with extreme un-American views Donald Trump really is channeling the thoughts of the nation’s founders and some of its greatest presidents in their advocacy of few if any foreign entanglements (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/founding-fathers-2016-donald-trump-america-first-foreign-policy-isolationist-213873). 

It’s a piece replete with citations quoting Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams and John Quincy Adams to buttress the idea that foreign ventures would ensnare the country in affairs best left to people on the other side of the Atlantic, the Pacific, of course, being no point of reference to their late 18th and early 19th century minds.

Since the start of World War II, however, the United States has been globally engaged, first fighting the Axis Powers, then confronting Communist Soviet Union, China and Cuba in a Cold War, followed by a patchwork of alliances and adventures in the Middle East, the most recent being our tragic years-upon-years involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and our arms-length position vis-a-vis Syria.  

“But it is fair to ask, as Trump is, why we are simply continuing, through inertia and with little change, a system that was built up to thwart a set of threats that no longer exist,” wrote Hirsh. “Maybe this vast, expensive global order was necessary against Hitler, and later Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—the very real threats of tyranny, totalitarianism and international communism in the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s—but is Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping's China, really enough of a threat to justify the same expense and effort? It’s also fair to ask—as Trump does, in his blunt way—whether U.S. allies have grown a bit spoiled and barely notice any longer who’s holding that defense umbrella over their heads, allowing them to continue massive spending on their welfare states.”

Trump’s advocacy of a reimagined United States relationship with our allies, and by extension our adversaries, has tapped a reservoir of innate American isolationism made all the more potent by a failed war in Vietnam (though the feared Domino Effect never transpired) and the twin disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

In the end, though, it should come down not to the electorate’s knowledge of historical admonitions but rather to the confidence Americans have in the knowledge, leadership and diplomatic skills they want in their next president. Trump has displayed little of those skills as he has rampaged through the Republican primary process, flipping positions as quickly as one changes gears in a sports car. He is not thought highly of in most foreign capitals. If he’s elected, heads of state will have to deal with him but they might never be confident his word would be his bond.

The closest we have to a Republican head of state is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the second in line to be president should tragedy strike the chief executive and the vice president. Ryan has yet to endorse the presumptive nominee of his party, but with each passing day Republican office holders appear to be swallowing their scruples and lining up, however reluctantly, behind Trump. It’s only a matter of time before Ryan caves, and without extracting any implementable concessions.

It seems they are all more interested in winning than in protecting the principles of the republic and their party. Their professed animosity toward Hillary Clinton trumps (pun intended) the reality that The Donald is unfit to be president of the mightiest country in the world, a country that has been a symbol of equality and decency throughout the world but under Trump would be willing to discriminate against Muslims and would sanction torture. The damage to American prestige would be incalculable.

No criticism is more pointed than from within one’s family, so here’s an excerpt from Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist of The New York Times, describing the factionalism of the Republican party that led to Trump’s rise and his own failure to foresee his appeal: 

“So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies. (Even though I didn’t agree with many of those policies myself, I assumed from the party’s longstanding resistance to change that someone did!) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments. And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.” (http://nyti.ms/1rZxgcB)

Memories From the Mail

Oliver Munday had no way of knowing, no way of knowing his illustration accompanying a NY Times Op-Ed piece Tuesday on the meaning behind Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would evoke memories of the Nazi extermination of my father’s family in the shtetl of Ottynia, a small town in what is now the Ukraine, but back during World War II was part of occupied Poland.

Munday’s illustration portrays air mail delivery of a letter. It depicts a bird with outstretched wings, wings made to look like jail cell doors, a letter carried in its bill (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/opinion/dr-kings-righteous-fury.html?ref=opinion&_r=0). Among the treasures my father left are four postcards from his family that trace Ottynia’s fate during the war. The first three bear stamps from CCCP, the Soviet Union. The intertwined sickle and hammer symbol of the proletariat  is at the top left corner of each postcard. At the start of the war, Ottynia fell into Stalin’s hands as part of his Polish partition pact with Hitler. 

Soviet stamps and symbol are on the fourth and final postcard. Though the black ink is fading, the postmark is from September 21, 1941. In red ink, just below the middle of the front of the postcard, is the imprint of another official insignia, a bird with outstretched wings, a swastika inside a circle in its talons. Fourteen days later, perhaps even before the postcard arrived at my father’s residence at 148 Van Sicklen Street in Brooklyn, the Nazis killed most of the Jews who lived in Ottynia, trucking them to a mass grave before shooting them. Only his brother, Willy, survived from his immediate family. Their parents, their sisters and brother, and Willy’s first wife and son were killed. The Jewish presence in Ottynia, initially recorded in 1635 but perhaps from many years earlier, ended after more than three centuries.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16 to live and work in Danzig (now Gdansk). He emigrated to the United States in January 1939. As many from his village who came before (and after) him did, he joined the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association, eventually becoming its president for many years. Two Sundays ago, the association held its 113th annual gathering. About 30 of us met in Mendy’s delicatessen in Manhattan for a luncheon, less than one-twentieth the number that assembled in the Hotel Commodore in 1950 for the jubilee celebration of the society. 

My father and Uncle Willy (who came to the States after the war) rarely talked about Ottynia. Indeed, nostalgia for Ottynia was not an emotion I would associate with any of the men and women I knew growing up who came from the town. That’s not to say they didn’t have memories of life there. It’s just that, like my father, they preferred to look forward, not backward. They lived in the company of their surviving friends, not the ghosts of the departed.

In Ottynia, my father said he ate potatoes every day. He became so fed up with eating spuds that upon arriving in Danzig he vowed never to eat a potato again. He kept that promise to himself for about a decade until one day a waitress coaxed him into trying some potatoes with his meal. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. He was a meat and potatoes man for the rest of his life. He rarely ate any other vegetable. Just potatoes. Hardly anything green ever graced our dinette table in Brooklyn. 

Though he would return now and then to Ottynia—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the fender of a large car in Ottynia—he'd always go back to the city life of Danzig. 

In my father’s house in the 1950s and early 1960s, the telephone was a necessary evil not to be used for prolonged conversation unless it was being used to communicate with his society brethren.

Ottynia had a very personal meaning to my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me. It meant a tight knit group of eight couples that formed monthly floating poker games, men in one room, women in another. Nickel, dime, quarter stakes. I learned how to mix highballs for them. When I was around ten, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously.  The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. For all its simple peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that served them well throughout the four corners of the earth. What my father learned in cheder (Hebrew school) and in the public school he attended through sixth grade in Ottynia laid the foundation for a successful business and personal life that has extended into his children and grandchildren and hopefully will continue for generations.

  

Marking a Birthday

The yahrzeit memorial candle commemorating the 13th Jewish calendar anniversary of my father’s death burned longer than 24 hours. It flickered Wednesday night, the eve, by coincidence, of my father’s secular calendar birthday, January 5. He would have been 101 today. Or maybe 100. My brother, sister and I simply don’t know.

Several Polish documents—a “morality testimony” and a “certificate of belonging”— list his birthday in 1911. But he often said records were not very exact in Ottynia, the little town, a shtetl, in Galicia where he was born. He would say he was born in 1912. So that’s what we put on his tombstone.

Now part of Ukraine, Ottynia passed through many hands over the centuries. When my dad was born, Ottynia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I it reverted to Poland. During World War II, Ottynia fell under Soviet Union control as part of the partition of Poland pact Stalin forged with Hitler. Nazi Germany overwhelmed Ottynia after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. At the end of the war, Ottynia became a military-restricted area in Ukraine.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16, venturing first to the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea before coming to America via England in January 1939, months before the second world war broke out. All of his immediate family, except his younger brother, Willy, were killed. Though he would tell his children folklore stories, really parables, about life in the Old Country while we were growing up in Brooklyn, he rarely talked about conditions in Ottynia or Danzig.

Perhaps they were too painful to relate. Trying to raise funds to bring other members of his family here, he was powerless to relieve the pressure on their lives. Among his possessions when he died were three postcards from his parents we’d never previously seen. In painstakingly small Yiddish handwriting, they convey the sorrow of parents who haven’t seen their eldest child in two years, the agony of life in a weakened state. The first two were postmarked by Russian authorities. Stamped on the front of the third and final postcard, just under his name, is a symbol of the Nazi flying eagle holding a swastika.

The Great Patriotic War

Here’s a short pop quiz: What was the turning point of World War II In Europe?

I’d wager many of you answered D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.

The more correct answer, according to most historians and to all Russians, would be the Battle of Stalingrad. Fought between July 17, 1942 and February 2, 1943, the battle for Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd, gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus region, was among the bloodiest ever fought. Close to two million casualties from both sides. Though they defeated Germany’s Sixth Army, the Russians paid a dear price—they claim losses of 478,741 dead Russian soldiers, 650,878 wounded. More than 40,000 civilians died. The city was left in ruins. The soil wouldn’t produce crops for three years.

To the northwest, the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) lasted for nearly 900 days. Some 1.5 million Russians died.

Overall, Russia says it lost 20 million soldiers during WWII, or what they call the Second Great Patriotic War (the first being the defense of the motherland from Napoleon’s invasion). Another eight million civilians died. Twenty-eight million out of a population of about 170 million. One out of every six citizens (16.5%). Hardly a family did not have a relative killed during the war.

By contrast, the U.S. lost 408,000 from a population of 131 million (0.3%). Aside from the attack on Pearl Harbor, random coastal shellings and combat on some islands of the archipelago of Alaska, American soil was not breached. No civilian population centers were terrorized or captured. Life went on, albeit under rationed goods. But vigilance on the home front couldn’t compare to the deprivations and brutality of living in conquered or embattled Russian territory.

Is it any wonder Stalin vehemently argued for the opening of a second front against Germany? He complained to FDR and Churchill the Soviet Union was bearing all the burden in fighting the Nazis, both in terms of the loss of life and the destruction of its territory.

I’m no expert on WWII, though I’ve seen my share of war movies, read some history and historic novels, so I have a pretty good idea what went on. A visit to Moscow’s Military Museum brings the conflict to life from a whole different perspective. I’d always thought America had supplied vast amounts of war materiel to Russia through the Lend Lease program beginning in the summer of 1941, before we entered the war but after Hitler tore up the non aggression pact and attacked Russia. To be sure, we did send in much needed supplies and equipment. But the Russians, themselves, produced the vast majority of their weaponry, developing numerous tank and airplane models. They developed the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher during the war. One of the best, if not the best, assault rifle, was also developed during WWII by Mikhail Kalashinkov.

Don’t take this commentary as any defense of Russia’s behavior before, during or after the war. But knowing what the Russians endured places their actions in context. Indeed, one of the major themes to emerge from Gilda’s and my two weeks in Russia was a greater appreciation of the hardships the people of this vast land have suffered through for centuries. Not decades. Centuries. They suffered through despots. The masses were slaves—serfs bound to their master’s land with no right to move—until 1861. Even their religion at times offered little comfort. In the Middle Ages, deadly violence rippled through the church’s competing factions. After the Bolsheviks took over, churches were closed, priests and nuns executed. The Soviet Union failed to provide a softer, more fulfilling life. After perestroika, their economy, meager as it was, collapsed.

The people, however, retained their sense of humor. They measured governments and leaders by the quality of the jokes about them. They revealed a resiliency forged through years of deprivation and suffering.

Russia is not a workers’ paradise. It is not a capitalist bastion. It’s a little like the Wild West. It’s not a full democracy, but is better than it ever was.


This concludes Russia Week at No Socks Needed Anymore. There’s much more I could tell, but I probably overtaxed your interest already, so I’ll go back to “normal” blogging next week.